


Good Men Being Hard to Find

by tulipohare



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Post Traumatic Stress, Road Trip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-04
Updated: 2014-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-21 23:14:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1567538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tulipohare/pseuds/tulipohare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They hit the Texas panhandle the morning after Memphis and it’s just god-awful.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Good Men Being Hard to Find

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to killerville and amandahjean and marg.
> 
> While writing this I listened to [Old School](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQ5abbc_pzM) and [Harlem Roulette](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzv7oiKqOvU) and [Skylark](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVvIpFhBmqw).

There was discussion of taking bikes.

Well, Steve began to say “You know, there’s motorcycle license classes-“ and Sam lifted eyebrows over a tall mug of coffee until he stopped talking. 

Easy Rider was terminally boring.

They are going to the desert because Steve has never been and because he needs a rest. They are going because Sam thinks driving 80 down an almost-abandoned highway is near to flying. Because Sam thinks this new guy, crumple-faced, currently crashing on a hastily purchased mattress in his spare room, could probably use a little space. In the desert there are no hills or trees or mountains blocking the line of sight, and there is sun and heat.

“Now if you look out your right window you’ll see real America”, Sam says, once they hit Indiana, “highways and gas stations and genetically modified soybean fields, or whatever that is.”

Steve catches the reference, and laughs until he shakes a little. His knee is propped up on the open passenger side window and he’s scrolling through Sam’s phone for music. Sam’s about to cut him off; he played Old School from Mouse and the Mask four times in a row because Bucky hummed a tiny laugh at some of the lyrics the first time.

Bucky’s stretched out in the back seat, his hand loosely curled around the straps of his bag. He ate seven eggs with Louisiana hot sauce at the diner this morning and hasn’t said much. 

Sam catches his eye in the rearview mirror and Bucky’s forehead wrinkles. Not anxious, just a wordless “what?”

Sam tries to convey “nothing” with the corner of his mouth, and then pulls his phone away from Steve. Steve leans his head back and laughs. 

Sam’s sister has texted him, a picture of the azaleas her husband frets over when he’s not lecturing eager 19 year olds, with a huge pair of shears brandished over them and her face peeping in the corner, manic grin. 

“No texting while driving,” Steve says, and grabs it from him, “Watch the road.”

“Do Once in a While next, Steve,” says Bucky, biting into an apple. Steve takes in an audibly sharp breath. 

“I don’t think he has that song,” Steve says, quiet.

They had a fuck of a time getting Bucky to remember to eat for the first few weeks. Then Sam started pulling an empty chair into the kitchen. He’d just position it near the door and let it sit there as he cooked. Couple of days and Bucky was straddling it with his arms on the backrest, watching Sam or Steve or both slice green onions into tiny bits, or squish meat around in a Ziploc bag full of marinade, or pour cereal. 

Attachment theorists would write papers. 

Sam’s not really one for attachment theory.

“No,” Sam says, “I don’t think I do.”

The next time Sam checks the rearview, Bucky’s eyes are closed and his mouth is slightly open. He’s wearing one of Sam’s white t-shirts and the apple’s sticker clings to the stretched-out collar. 

Steve insists on Memphis, says he has his reasons, so they have to turn south. The motel has two beds and a pullout from the tiny couch.

Steve wakes up thrashing. This isn’t new. It’s happened to each of them. The others sit in silence until the gasps abate. Sometimes Steve gets up to put his hand on Bucky’s shoulder. Sometimes Bucky nudges Sam and shoves a tiny paper cone of water at him.

 

\---

 

It’s been…fluid, these weeks.

In Fury’s forest bunker or lair or whatever, before the Triskelion, before everything, Sam went into the kitchen and spread peanut butter on twelve grain bread, and made coffee, and then came out to the wide warehouse floor where Fury had set up Ops. Steve was sitting with elbows on knees, a deepening crease between his eyebrows. He looked up, and saw Sam, and nodded, slightly. And then everything was different.

Sam is besotted. He tried not to be.

Maintaining healthy boundaries is his thing, top of the class, A+ counseling skills. Hiding how he actually feels, well. Not so much.

They stood, one morning before setting out to find Bucky, leaning on the bridge, watching the early summer haze lift. Steve turned, suddenly, like he was about to slide past Sam’s body and head home, but then he stopped. Sam couldn’t help but sway toward him, just a little. 

Steve heaved a breath and then two, his chest rising. Sam looked down at the inches between them, then up at Steve’s face, and said, like some kind of idiot, “Hi.” 

He could feel Steve’s hands hovering around his hips for one brief and vaguely feverish second, but no, Steve slipped away and pushed off for home.

 

They found Bucky easily. He was squatting on the southeast side, scraping by with some help from his next door neighbor. They sat in plain sight on the bus stop bench across the street from his building for hours. 

He came to them.

“Do you know what the fuck is happening?” he said.

Steve was crying when he said, “Yes. We know. We can help.”

Bucky laughed bitterly. He was holding one arm close to his body, stiffly, under his jacket like it was in a sling.

“You’re not going to like it,” he said.

When Bucky went upstairs to grab whatever passed for his PE (a ceramic mug that said “El mejor papá del mundo!”, a change of clothes, one of those flattened elongated museum pennies), Ruben the neighbor waved Sam over behind his HVAC van.

“Vet?” Ruben said in a quiet, measured voice.

“Yeah,” Sam said, “he is.”

“Yeah,” said Ruben, “I heard things through the wall sometimes. My brother was at Fallujah, OVR, came back...” 

He made a gusty whistling sound, and shook his head.

Steve wanted Bucky to stay at his place, but Sam wouldn't budge, “Nah, man. Sorry. You’re going to have to trust me on this one. You got your job; I got mine.”

Steve fought, but not as long as Sam expected him to. 

He stood by Sam’s front door, holding his hands slightly in front of him, staring.

“He’s staring,” said Bucky, trying to maneuver his malfunctioning robot-Hydra-who-knows arm into the hoodie that Sam had tossed at him.

“We’ll get that fixed,” Steve said in a rush, gesturing vaguely, “Your arm. I, uh...I know a guy.”

“Oh,” said Bucky, his head hidden by fabric, “Okay.”

Sam sat Bucky down at his kitchen table while Steve hovered in the living room, straightening wall hangings and folding and re-folding the afghans that Sam keeps on his couch. 

He tried to keep his voice light, faintly jovial. 

“Look man, you don’t have to talk to me about anything you don’t want to talk about. But answer me one question, okay?”

Bucky stared into middle distance and Sam took it as assent.

“If I put you in my spare room for a while, give up my good shower...are you gonna try to hurt me?”

Bucky looked up, meeting his eyes for the first time, and there was recognition, gratitude? whatever it was, it was human. His face looked very soft and he hadn’t shaved, and the dark circles under his eyes belonged to someone with a drug or vampirism problem.

“No,” he said quietly, “I don’t think so.”

Sam believed him. 

But he gathered the disparate parts of his hand gun and gave them to Steve along with his lockbox key.

“Go on home, man. He’s asleep. You can come back tomorrow, I promise.”

Steve looked lost. He chewed on his lower lip and scrubbed a hand through his hair.

“Look I know people," Sam said, trying for reassuring, "the best people, they can—“

But then Steve’s hand was curled around the back of Sam’s neck and he had to stop talking because he felt actual pain.

“Thank you,” said Steve, and all Sam could see was the particular angle of his upper lip. His hands went to Steve’s waist before he could help himself, but Steve didn’t flinch, or balk, or even change his expression. 

“It’s what I do,” Sam tried to say, but it got stuck halfway and came out one-tenth as cool as he meant it to sound.

“I don’t...” Steve said, “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

The long curve of his waist was warm. Steve’s thumb swiped slow arcs underneath Sam’s ear.

“It’s okay,” Sam said, “It’s all...whatever is okay. You know that, right?”

Steve put his face into Sam’s shoulder and breathed.

 

\---

 

They hit the Texas panhandle the morning after Memphis and it’s just god-awful.

“This has to be purgatory,” Steve says. His shades sit atop his head and he’s wearing gym shorts and he looks like his name is Chad and it’s rush week. Sam wants to kiss him straight on his grimacing mouth.

“No,” says Bucky, “Purgatory’s uphill. And you get breaks.” 

“Well, maybe it’s been 80 years since I cracked the Baltimore Catechism, but this has got to be some layer of punishment,” Steve says, and Bucky huffs a little.

Sam was at Lackland for a month or so on a minor training assignment. Downstate in the hills isn’t too bad, but this beige never-ending flatness might just kill somebody.

“Either of you care about Buddy Holly?” he says, and they both say, “Who’s Buddy Holly?”

Pass on Lubbock, then. Thank God.

Just outside of Shamrock, Bucky says, “Sam, pull over. Now.”

He pukes on the side of the road. Sam and Steve each try to touch his back, but he jerks away from them, and rests his hands on his knees. 

Sam passes him a water bottle and then sits in the brittle grass, upwind from the pile of sick. He pulls Steve down with him as Bucky pours water over his head and pants and swallows.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Steve says.

“Do I want to talk about it,” says Bucky, dull and flat. He does this sometimes. Sam asks his opinion, or gives him the choice of washing or drying dishes and he repeats the question like he can’t quite grasp the underlying concept.

Bucky edges nearer and crouches down. He’s burst a blood vessel in his eye from puking; there’s a tiny red spot in the corner of the white.

“One time—“ Bucky starts.

He’s talking directly to Sam, looking straight into his eyes. Sam tries to be still, keep neutral.

“In T’Bilisi there was this – boy. Fifteen maybe. Reading some magazine,” he laughs suddenly, “New Kids on the Block. I saw it on the ground, after.”

Steve doesn’t say “It wasn’t you; It wasn’t your fault.” Not anymore, not after that first time when Bucky turned and threw a glass against the wall and said, “My hands did it. You can’t make it not have happened.”

“You ever do that to something soft and small?” Bucky says.

“Man,” says Sam, and he’s not crying, but he might as well be.

“Man, they all were. None of them wanted to go.”

Steve is shaking, a little, Sam can feel the tremor against his shoulder.

Bucky flops, suddenly, down in front of them, and looks up at the eternal blue haze until it is too bright to bear. His side is just touching each of their knees. Sam's hit with a sudden deep urge to brush away a piece of hair that's caught on Bucky's mouth, but he won't. Not now. Steve presses a hand down on Sam’s thigh and it’s probably breaking 100 degrees in the grass in North Texas but he doesn’t care.

“You remember what we used to say?” Bucky asks after a long moment. Sam has no idea what he’s talking about.

Steve laughs kind of wetly.

“Yeah,” he says, “I remember.”

 

That evening when Bucky is in the shower with a trash bag over his robo-arm Steve crowds Sam up against the wall and presses their mouths together. He's hard and solid and pushy and mutters things like "baby" and "please" into Sam's mouth. Sam gets his legs around one of Steve's thighs and his hands down the back of Steve's terrible frat boy shorts and holds on while something in his chest pulls 30 G's.

In the back of his mind he hears the water in the bathroom shut off, and Steve pulls back a little. He lifts his hands to Sam's face and traces a thumb around the outline of Sam's mouth. Sam knocks their foreheads together gently and laughs. Steve looks kind of wild and kind of scared, and his dick is searing against Sam's hip. 

 

In the night, semis rattle the hotel windows as they roll down the New Mexico highway. Sam sleeps with Steve's hand curled around his wrist, and when Bucky wakes from a nightmare, it is with a faint gasp instead of a scream, and he goes back to sleep almost immediately.


End file.
